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November 3 - November 3, 2020
By the 1890s liberal judges’ expansive approach to the law had achieved breathtaking reach. By embracing classical economic theory, they applied the doctrine of substantive due process to enshrine a set of economic laws that no democratic government could overturn; they transformed metaphorical natural law into a body of actual law created by the judiciary. They treated freedom of contract, open competition, and laissez-faire as part of the Constitution. Judges justified their legal opinions by citing the laws of nature and the “laws” of the market, although neither was to be found on the
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The Sherman Antitrust Act became virtually a dead letter against corporations for much of the 1890s, but unions, which were not the original concern of the legislation, became its targets. The courts could empty laws of content and fill them with new meaning. Of the thirteen decisions invoking antitrust law between 1890 and 1897, twelve involved labor unions.
Taken as a whole, the decisions of the liberal judges contributed to a remarkable expansion of government power in the 1890s and into the twentieth century. The courts did so with and without the cooperation of Congress.
Judges and courts became basic sites of state building, performing functions in the United States that bureaucracies undertook in other countries. The Supreme Court overturned old practices and clear precedents.
of itself. The irony of the judicial imperialism forged in the late nineteenth century was that it created tools, precedents, and processes that could be turned to very different purposes later.76 The liberal enshrinement of classical economics in the law took place just as a rising generation of economists shredded the old doctrines.
By the 1890s, the liberals and classical economists had lost the intellectual battle, though their ideas were still regnant on the bench. Judges appealed to economic theory already deemed antique and abandoned by most economists.
William McKinley, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, had served in the Twenty-third Ohio under Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes. The deep legacies of the war remained, but the issues of 1866—racial equality, the protection of black rights in the South, and Indian policy—were receding from the national stage, though they had by no means wholly disappeared.
In 1892 Jay Gould was very rich, very sick, and very reviled. He was the face of American financial capitalism, and one of several faces Americans put on monopoly. Gould’s last years had been marked by defeats and Pyrrhic victories. Having bested Charles Francis Adams for control of the Union Pacific Railroad, he found that the fruit of his victory rotted in his hands.
He retained control of the profitable New York “El,” the Manhattan Railroad, but could not get permission to add a third track, which would have ruined Battery Park, wrecked Broadway, and in the words of the Pulitzer’s World, “shut out the air and sunlight from thousands of downtown residents.”
The failure of American democracy registered in the people’s assent to a plutocracy: “If we have a plutocracy, it may be partly because the rich want it, but it is infinitely more because the poor choose it or allow it.”
In the so-called battle of the standards, silver stood for equality and fraternity; gold stood for liberty in the old liberal sense of sanctity of property. Technically, the United States was bimetallist since silver coins still circulated, but it was a de facto gold standard nation since its currency and bonds were redeemable in gold and the Treasury always paid out in gold.
Mr. Morgan’s suggestions saved the nation from default and netted Morgan and the House of Rothschild, whom Belmont represented, a hefty profit. The bankers secured pledges from other banks to halt gold withdrawals, and they disposed of the bonds easily and quickly. The Rothschilds’ involvement ensured a wave of anti-Semitic abuse, but the New York World hit the key charge: the Cleveland administration had “gratuitously given to the syndicate in a secret conference” what amounted to a $5 million bonus with little risk on their part, “and it will be paid out of the public treasury.” The World
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All of the groups seeking reform agreed on the basic problems with the gold standard. First of all, it was deflationary, providing neither an adequate money supply nor a flexible one, which contributed to financial panics and deflation. Second, it removed control of the financial system from the United States to London, the seat of the international economy and capital of the world’s creditor nation, Great Britain. Third, coupled with the National Banking System, it concentrated money and credit in the Northeast, leaving the West and South starved for funds.
Advocates of the gold standard had the advantages of not only position—they controlled the presidency, the Treasury, and the banks—but also of defending a single position against divided adversaries.
Gold-standard advocates, who increasingly tended to be more conservative Republicans, associated gold with stability, natural values, a harmony of interests, prosperity, civilization, the white race, expertise, and American participation in the international economy. Where silverites denounced gold as the tool of international bankers and Great Britain, goldbugs praised it as the medium of international commerce.
Silver, they claimed, was the standard of “barbarian” nations like China and the republics of South America. When opponents attacked the gold standard as arbitrary and deflationary, proponents defended it as natural and as a bar to inflation.
Goldbugs found it more effective to attack than defend, and they denounced their opponents as radicals, communards, barbarians, and ignoramuses. They regarded the silverites as scofflaws seeking to escape their just debts.
They denounced gold Republicans as members of a party of Gold and Greed, condemning the “rapacious greed and tyrannical power of gold.” Gold made “the rich richer, and the poor poorer.” It was the currency of monopoly. It rewarded speculation and demeaned labor, and with Cleveland’s bond policy, it drove the nation into debt to reward bankers.
Arguments against gold sometimes acquired a tinge of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism was the language of almost any nineteenth-century discussion of money and banking, and the Populists, the leading critics of the gold standard, were remarkably tolerant in this respect.
Republicans, and most Democrats agreed on it: disavow Grover Cleveland and, as far as possible, prevent him from doing any more damage. So complete was the disaster of the Cleveland administration that the election should have been no contest at all.
McKinley gained the largest percentage of the popular vote, 51 percent, since Grant. He swept the Midwest and even gained North Dakota in the Middle Border. He carried California and Oregon and took four border states. He dominated the cities, even New York City. He took 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176.71 As in many American campaigns, a switch of a relatively small number of votes in key states could have changed the outcome.
But this election was different. As the middle-of-the-road Populists had warned, loading the hope for a “producer’s republic” onto a Bryan candidacy meant taking a tremendous chance. The Populists as a separate party did not disappear, but they were thereafter a shadow of themselves.
Nor was the pendulum about to swing back to the Democrats any time soon. The old ethnocultural balance of American politics had toppled. The election of 1894 had begun to solidify a critical realignment first noticeable in the state elections of 1893. The new alignment came less from mass changes in party loyalty, although there was party switching in the chaotic years between 1893 and 1897, and more from a combination of the ability of the Republicans to mobilize new voters and remobilize voters they had temporarily lost, and the decreasing ability of Democrats to muster their voters.
Both parties kept their base, but the Democratic base grew smaller and less active. The Northeast and eastern sections of the Midwest led the movement into the Republican Party.
Despite the mass turnout of 1896, fewer people would vote in the new electoral system taking shape in the 1890s. The Populists failed in the South, but they had terrified the Southern Bourbons, whose solution was to disenfranchise blacks through legal restrictions modeled after those in Mississippi and to partially extend them to poor whites through the poll tax.
The decrease in turnout was also due to electoral reforms such as those the Republicans pushed through in New York: registration laws, restrictions on naturalization, the Australian ballot, and literacy tests. These were intended to cut electoral participation, and they did. Another part of the decline arose from the declining competitiveness of the parties and demise of the old army campaigns. It became harder to mobilize voters. The country became an almost solidly Democratic South and, once the impact of the 1896 campaign faded, a Republican North, Midwest, and West.
In North Carolina, too, antimonopoly triumphed as the state-level fusion ticket of Republicans and Populists triumphed. It was the kind of victory that struck horror into the hearts of Southern Bourbons, and in 1898 a bloody horror was the result.
It made the same points that Ida Wells had been making for years: many interracial sexual relationships were consensual. This was read as a slander on white women. A white mob destroyed the offending press, murdered ten black men, and drove the remaining black Republican leaders out of town.
A third major change, one for which Bryan deserves much of the credit, reflected a shift in attitudes toward governance. The Populists had been a party of government activism and intervention, as well as democratization of governance. Bryan’s charge that the Republicans were the party of corporate power and monopoly had an element of truth, but a deeper truth was that the Republicans had long been the party of government intervention and public welfare, which is one reason the Mugwumps had proved so restless within it. It was the party of corporate subsidies, of the tariff, and increasingly of
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The great symbolic issue of the election, the gold standard, lost its salience, in part because its practical significance lessened. The gold standard continued to be clumsy and unsustainable, but in the historical moment it survived because gold discoveries first in South Africa and then in the Klondike in 1896 dramatically increased supplies of that metal, easing deflationary pressures.82
Liberals had believed that laissez-faire, contract freedom, and competition would eliminate corruption, sustain independent production, and prevent the rise of the very rich and very poor. Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.
They assumed that once the necessary work of destruction was done, the new world would emerge under their guidance, as they supervised the working out of eternal laws of nature, the market, and society. They expected a self-regulating order and got near chaos. In opposition, liberalism had been active, creative, and progressive. With its old enemies largely vanquished, it had grown sclerotic and rigid.
Government on all levels often determined the outcome of conflicts between labor and business, with the federal government increasingly coming down on the side of employers by the end of the century. Federal monetary and banking policy favored some areas of the country and some kinds of production over others. There were vigorous attempts at government regulation to correct inequities, but by the 1890s the courts were invalidating many of them.
Antimonopolists at their most conspiratorial thought it was bankers and plutocrats, but anyone who has spent much time in their correspondence gets the sense of men riding an avalanche that they could neither control nor stop. Charles Francis Adams dismissed them as mere money-getters and traders, for good reason. It might seem that in this great age of invention and innovation, it was the inventors who pushed society forward. But Thomas Edison served more as a symbol of invention and less as the thing itself. Actual invention resulted from the hands and minds of tens of thousands of American
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Father Abraham, without ceasing to be the symbol of masculine self-making, had also become the mother and child of the Republic. He had become both protean and reduced. To be everything to everyone, he had been largely emptied of historical content, and more than that, the failures of his vision, as well as the larger Republican vision, for the country had to be ignored.
He had not foreseen the size of the factories in which they worked, nor the poverty that he had thought would be banished with the end of slavery. He had assumed that the material abundance pouring from American farms, factories, mines, and shops would translate into general prosperity. Lincoln believed that political freedom ensured a general prosperity and a general equality; all around Addams, as she walked to Lincoln Park, was evidence that it had not and did not.
The 1890s marked the tipping point in the turn toward government. In turning to government, particularly the federal government, reformers joined Whiggish Republicans and businessmen, who wanted aid and favors as well as assistance in reining in the era’s destructive competition. Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party remained the last bastion of localism and small government, but in the crisis of the 1890s even Cleveland turned to the courts and the army to crush labor, over the objections of state and local officials.
Wilson was a Democrat and Roosevelt a Republican. Both were intellectuals turned to public life. They had grown to maturity in Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. Wilson had been deeply marked also by his Southern upbringing. He was racist to the core, but racism had hardly been separate from reform in the Gilded Age. Reformers had entrenched themselves in the dominant factions of both political parties, and the fear of rising inequality, class conflict, declining well-being, and the loss of the power of ordinary citizens stirred them ever more deeply.
